Saturday, November 17, 2012

I am pleased to announce that the Retrosheet website has had its fall update
with many additions and revisions.

1. The 2012 season data are now available and player pages are up to
date with this information.

2. Play by play files have been added for both leagues for 1946, 1945
and for the 1931 AL. In each case, we have between half and two thirds of
the games, but those have all received our standard rigorous proofing of
comparing totals against the official totals on a daily basis. The 1931
project received great help from Cliff Blau, who input many games into our
computer format, Walter LeConte, who scanned hundreds of games from St.
Louis newspapers, and Clem Comly who entered the games Walter collected and
also did all the early stages of the proofing.

3. This proofing has led to the discovery of many discrepancies with
the official totals and all are thoroughly documented on our site. Also,
the 1948 and 1949 seasons have had their discrepancies completed to
encompass all the games we have posted for those years.

4. Tom Ruane has completed the careful processing of the 1915 AL and
NL official daily data to create his excellent, detailed box scores for that
season. This information has also been incorporated into the player pages.
The 1915 Federal League is not included yet, but work is underway there as
well.

5. David Vincent has undertaken a systematic review of event files
from the present back to 1972 and is continuing to work on earlier seasons.
He has not only standardized the syntax of events of many cases, but also
added details for hundreds of ejections. To do this, he created a new type
of comment record which documents each of these events in a consistent
format. The ejectee, his role (player, manager, coach), the umpire and a
brief description of the reason are in each record. David has been helped
by some others who researched details: Rich Carletti, Paul Golba, and Trent
McCotter have been especially helpful in this regard.

As always, we work very hard to make all parts of our data as accurate as
possible. However, with the huge amount of information on our site, there
are bound to be some glitches. Our loyal readers have always been
tremendously helpful in alerting us to issues that we need to address. I
ask you to please continue that help and send any questions you have to me
or to our webmaster, Mark Pankin.

Reader Comments and Retorts

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Surprisingly (to me), there have been 441 seasons where a pitcher had the same number of decisions as GS (min 162 IP). Of course most of them were guys who also pitched at least some relief so some of the decisions may have come there. There seemed to be three names that came up a few times:

Vic Willis, 1901-06: teaches me the lesson that some guys have more decisions than starts! From 1901 to 1906, he had 233 starts, 14 relief appearances and 234 decisions. He also had a losing record.

Gaylord Perry, 1972-75: 155 starts, 1 relief, 147 decisions. Unfortunately that one relief appearance came in the year with 40 starts and 40 decisions.

Even guys like Wood and Niekro didn't have runs like Perry. Niekro's best was 41 decisions in 44 starts in 1979. Of course he was 40 years old. If we ignore 1973, Fergie had a 5-year run of 179 decisions in 192 starts.

One thing that changed in this release - much of the information from David Vincent's ejections database has been incorporated.

Also, Harvey Haddix's 1959 12-inning perfecto lost in the 13th now has pitch count data for Haddix (with the exception of Lew Burdette's inning-ending groundout in the 12th, which might have come on the first pitch - the count is updated but the pitches aren't). If my math and assumption on Burdette's PA are correct, Haddix threw 115 pitches, 80 for strikes.